The availability of state-of-the art communication, information and entertainment services such as telephony, eMail, internet access, music on demand, video on demand, online navigation, remote maintenance services, etc. in vehicles (private cars or public cars (i.e. taxis), trains or public transportation in general) is an increasing requirement from people travelling. An important prerequisite is data connectivity to the vehicles with data rates and QoS (Quality of Service) sufficient for the requested services.
For connectivity to moving vehicles a wireless connection is required, which can be provided by cellular mobile networks, such as GSM/GPRS/EDGE, UMTS/HSPA or LTE—or in some situation also by short range wireless networks, such as wireless local area networks (WLAN) or Bluetooth. For using information and entertainment services in vehicles, a connection to the required networks and service platforms can be established either directly by a mobile consumer device (e.g. smart phone, laptop, tablet) used in the vehicle or by a dedicated connectivity device integrated in the vehicle. Such approach is described, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,558,603 B2.
However, due to nature of radio wave propagation, due to different load situations in the mobile networks, due to different technologies available for radio access and due to different network topologies, the availability and performance of the connectivity (in terms of data throughput, delay, etc.) may be very different for different positions of the moving vehicles. This may lead to the situation that ongoing services will be degraded (e.g. browsing or downloading will become very slow, streaming will be disturbed) or even be interrupted.
In current mobile communication networks, there is no awareness of the connectivity requirements of specific services (e.g. differentiation between real-time and non real-time services) at the Physical Layer and MAC Layer. In particular, there is no possibility to anticipate the future connectivity requirements of moving vehicles and to dynamically adapt and optimize network and service parameters in order to provide an optimized service in the vehicles.